OpenAI has signed a 20-year agreement for approximately 8 gigawatts of computing capacity at SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike campus in southern Ohio, turning an ambitious data-center proposal into a contracted project.
SB Energy will build, own and operate the campus. OpenAI will begin paying only as completed capacity becomes available, starting with an expected 800 megawatts in 2028. The full buildout is scheduled to run through 2032.
Eight gigawatts describes the computing load, not the project’s total electricity demand. Supplying it will require at least 10 gigawatts of new generation, a power system larger than many conventional power plants.
Nvidia is underwriting the infrastructure
The most consequential part of the deal is not its size alone. It is the financial structure making that size possible.
Nvidia has committed support of up to $105 billion, but that figure is not a direct investment in the campus. Its securities filing describes conditional backing for defined portions of lease and power payments. CEO Jensen Huang says the package also includes a specified commitment tied to the facilities’ residual value.
The support activates in phases as capacity enters service from 2028 through 2030 and declines as OpenAI pays its obligations. Separately, Nvidia is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy.
Huang explained the underlying problem plainly:
“Frontier AI labs have extraordinary demand for training and inference compute, but many are growing faster than their balance sheets and long-term credit profiles can support.”
In effect, Nvidia is using its balance sheet to help make the land, power and buildings financeable. In return, PORTS-Pike will exclusively use Nvidia’s DSX computing platform, including its GPUs, CPUs and networking. Nvidia has committed to support the first 4.25 gigawatts and holds an option on the remaining 3.75.
That makes Nvidia more than OpenAI’s chip supplier. It becomes a financial partner in creating a vast, repeatedly upgradeable home for its own hardware.
A contract is not a completed campus
The agreement secures future capacity, but much of the physical project still depends on permits, financing, transmission construction and new gas-fired generation. The federal environmental review remains in progress, with none of its four tracked processes completed.
A public proposal currently covers up to 2 gigawatts of gas generation and still needs approval from Ohio regulators. The broader power buildout could carry a substantial climate cost: independent estimates for a previously announced 9.2-gigawatt gas plan range from 16.2 million to 19.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The lower estimate is roughly equivalent to the yearly emissions of 3.8 million gasoline cars.
The campus will span private land and part of the former Portsmouth uranium-enrichment complex, which produced material for military and commercial nuclear programs for about 50 years. Its transformation into an AI hub would replace one era of strategically important, power-hungry American infrastructure with another.
OpenAI and its partners project 35,000 construction jobs, 2,500 permanent jobs, at least $4.2 billion in regional grid investment and an initial $80 million community fund. Those benefits remain projections. So does the finished 8-gigawatt campus.
What exists today is a binding commercial structure: OpenAI has committed to lease the capacity, SB Energy has committed to build it, and Nvidia has committed its technology and financial weight to help make the project possible.